If Bacchus ever had a color he could claim for his own, it should surely be the shade of tannin on drunken lips, of John Keat's 'purple-stained mouth,' or perhaps even of Homer's dangerously wine-dark sea.

In precious opals there might be a dash of red here, a seductive swirl of blue there, and in the center, perhaps, a flirtatious glance of green. But each stone flickers with a unique fire and a good opal is one with an opinion of its own.

Patterns drawn in ultraviolet might make those ordinary little petals into the exotic peacocks of the botanical world, and yet we cannot appreciate them.

I realized it was like a dating agency: the ions are the lost souls looking for mates the electrolyte is the agency that can help them find each other.

Funny how we look for miracles in our lives when our life is one big miracle in itself.

Throughout Asia and Europe, pearls were traditionally believed to ease a range of conditions, including eye diseases, fever, insomnia, 'female complaints', dysentery, whooping cough, measles, loss of virility, and bed-wetting ... Though nobody seems to advertise the potential for pearls to cure bed-wetting anymore.

Human life is fragile: we live in the space between one breath and the next. We often try to maintain an illusion of permanence, through what we do, say... how we enjoy ourselves... Yet it is an illusion that is constantly being undermined by change and death.

Communists liked history very much. It just had to be the right history. They liked to remember it selectively.